<p>Hey guys,</p>
<p>It seems that whenever I am practicing critical reading passage questions I am always able to eliminate 3 of the answer choices. However, I always seem to get decieved and pick the wrong answer out of the two remaining choices. Is there any strategy to be able to determine which answer is definitely incorrect?</p>
<p>Exact same position bro. Three are usually blatantly wrong, but there is always two that makes you think to yourself, “Well this one seems more right but I could see how this one COULD be right also…”</p>
<p>rely on what’s blatantly obvious in/from the passage. sometimes thinking too deeply/critically and coming to your own conclusions/interpretations is ironically the wrong strategy for the SAT.</p>
<p>Utilize word level analysis to differentiate between two plausible answer choices.</p>
<p>Sometimes a certain would will stick out and that is indicative of a wrong answer.</p>
<p>I second the above. Don’t discount the importance of each individual word in the answer choices.</p>
<p>bump (10 char)</p>
<p>Ahhh yes! This is the real trick to the CR section of the SAT. I saw someone post on here one time something like “it sounds simple but the most important thing I can tell you is that the answer is always supported in the passage”. And that person is 100% right, I brought my SAT from a 670 to a 760 after learning that.</p>
<p>The correct answer will be in the passage, maybe stated extremely simple or stated extremely weird. The wrong answer will seem like it’s supported, it’ll seem like it was something the author would believe, or it’ll seem like it’s correct. But it’s not. To pick that answer you’re brain has to jump to a conclusion, and usually will. Just because it seems like it could be right doesn’t mean it is. The answer will be supported in the passage</p>
<p>This comes from Mystery Tutor, seems like very intelligent insight:</p>
<p>In school you’re encouraged to think beyond what’s in the passage, to infer, etc. Your teacher wants you to take your own meaning from the text. That’s how you’ve been learning to read for your entire life. You need to throw all of that away.</p>
<p>On the SAT, every question has to be completely bulletproof. Every question has a right answer, and that answer is always somewhere in the passage. If it weren’t, than anyone could come up with their own interpretation, and that wouldn’t do. That wouldn’t be healthy for The College Board which, and this is incredibly important to realize, is a business, not an educational outfit trying to test your reasoning, but a business trying to make money.</p>
<p>The correct answer always restates a part of the passage. If the correct answer to an easy question is “Dolphins are intelligent” then somewhere in the passage it will say “Dolphins are intelligent” or “Dolphins are smart”, or something similar. If it’s a hard question, than the restated part of the passage will be harder to find, but it will still say that Dolphins are intelligent, albeit in a more circular way. Maybe it will say “Dolphins have highly developed analytical brains” or something like that. It should actually be more clear than that on a real test, but I couldn’t come up with a ‘hard’ way to restate ‘Dolphins are intelligent’.</p>
<p>What I mean is that intelligence has no objective definition and so the passage should restate that ‘Dolphin’s are intelligent’ with a synonym of ‘intelligent’. You can’t make the jump from “Dolphins have highly developed analytical brains” to “Dolphins are intelligent” . You always need to ask yourself, “It seems like that answer would be right, but is it actually directly supported in the passage?”</p>